History and construction

One of America's most famous private residences, the stone mansion
was constructed by the architectsChester Holmes Aldrich and
William Adams Delano (Aldrich
was a distant relative of Junior's wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who was
involved as artistic consultant and in the interior design of the
mansion). Senior had originally purchased land in the area as early
as 1893, inspired by his brother William's ostentatious 204-room mansion
(Rockwood Hall), which had already been built in the
spectacular natural setting of the area.

In 1979, its occupant, Nelson
Rockefeller, upon his death, bequeathed his one-third interest
in the estate to the National Trust for Historic
Preservation. As a result of that gift, Kykuit is now open to
the public for tours. The tours are operated by Historic Hudson Valley. The imposing
local stone structure, fronted at the top with the Rockefeller
emblem, is centrally located in an inner sanctum of about ,
referred to as the "Park", in the expansive Rockefeller family estate. This inner
area is fenced off, patrolled and guarded at all times around its
perimeter, and has massive gates at its entrance. The rest of the
estate is known as the open space; apart from the family
residences, it has always been available to members of the public
for recreational purposes.

One of many gardens.

Initially,
landscaping of the grounds was given to the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, who had
designed Central
Park. Rockefeller senior was unhappy with this
work however and took over the design himself, transplanting whole
mature trees, designing lookouts and the many scenic winding roads.
In 1906, the further design of Kykuit's grounds was completed by
landscape architectWilliam Welles Bosworth, who
designed the surrounding terraces and gardens with fountains,
pavilion and classical sculpture. These gardens in the Beaux-Arts style are considered
Bosworth's best work in the United States, looking out over very
fine views of the Hudson River. His
original gardens still exist, with plantings carefully replaced
over time, although his entrance forecourt was extended in 1913.
The gardens are terraced, with formal axes, and include a Morning
Garden, Grand Staircase, Japanese Garden, an Italian Garden, a
Japanese-style brook, a Japanese Tea-house, a huge Oceanus fountain, a Temple of Aphrodite, loggia, and a
semicircular rose garden.

Kykuit was renovated and modernized in 1995 by the New Haven
architecture firm Herbert S. Newman and Partners. The work included
major infrastructure changes to enable it to accommodate group
tours of the first floor and art gallery, and provide guest rooms
on the upper floors. On the third and fourth floors the original
staff quarters were reconfigured and enlarged to become guest
suites.

The family estate

View from entryway.

The vast rambling estate, located north of New York City, occupies
a total area of about and is known as Pocantico, or
sometimes, Pocantico Hills. At its peak, the estate
covered almost and was described as a self-contained world, with
its resident workforce of security guards, gardeners and laborers,
and its own farming, cattle and food supplies. It has a nine-hole,
reversible golf course, and had a total, at one time, of
seventy-five houses and seventy private roads, most of them
designed by Rockefeller Senior and his son. A longstanding
witticism about the estate goes thus: 'It's what God would have
built, if only He had the money'.

Today, there are around ten Rockefeller families who live within
the estate, both in the fenced-in park area and beyond.
Much area
over the decades has been given over to New York State, such as the
Rockefeller State Park Preserve, and is open to the public
for horse riding, bike trails and running tracks (Bill Clinton, who lives just north of the
estate, in Chappaqua, has taken regular runs in the State
Park).

In late
1946, a portion of the estate was proposed as the site of the
UN
Headquarters, when New
York City was trying to beat off strong opposition from
Philadelphia and San Francisco and secure the organization.
Two of Junior's sons, John
D.3rd and Laurance both offered their estate
residences, Rockwood Hall and Fieldwood Farm,
respectively, for the site of the building. Junior—who was living
in Kykuit at the time—although appreciating the generous gesture,
vetoed it on the grounds that the estate was simply too isolated
from Manhattan. He subsequently sent his second eldest son, Nelson,
to buy a proposed development site along the East River which he
then donated for the headquarters.

Public tours

The inner park area was opened to restricted conducted tours of the
mansion and immediate surrounds in 1994, but it is still occupied
by and controlled by the family through the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which
leased the area from the National Trust for Historic Preservation
in 1991 and is the steward of what is now called "the historic
area".

Notable outbuildings

Originally the massive "Coach Barn", a three-story complex
ultimately redesigned and completed in 1913-14, in heavy stone from
the local area, it was the first new structure built on the estate.
It is three times the size of the Kykuit mansion. It still houses
today an impressive collection of horse-drawn carriages, and an
equally noteworthy collection of 12 family-owned vintage cars for
public viewing, graphically illustrating the development of
automotive design from the early to the mid-twentieth century. In
1994, with funding from David
Rockefeller and brother Laurance, its lower floor was converted
by the New Haven architects Herbert S. Newman and Partners into a
modern, fully-equipped meeting facility for the Fund's conferences,
with limited overnight accommodation on the upper floor. The
facilities, furthering the projects and objectives of the RBF
through conferences, seminars, workshops and retreats for RBF
staff, are also available to both domestic and foreign nonprofit
organizations, including annual gatherings of all the major
foundation presidents and UN
Security Council officials, amongst many other
dignitaries.

The "Playhouse" - The family seat. In the Park, this
is the location, since 1994, of the regular semi-annual family
meetings, in June and December.

A rambling French Norman two-story structure completed by Junior in
1927, this structure is also three times the size of the Kykuit
mansion. Standing alongside the nine-hole, reversible golf course,
and an outdoor swimming pool and two tennis courts, it contains an
array of sporting facilities, including an indoor swimming pool and
tennis court, fully equipped gym for basketball, a squash court, a
billiard room and a full-size bowling alley. It also has dining and
living rooms, and a huge reception room resembling an English
baronial hall.

The Orangerie - Housing citrus
plants, this is modeled after the original at the Palace of
Versailles.

Breuer Guest House - A modern house
that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, then disassembled, shipped to, and reassembled at
the estate.

Underground Bomb Shelter - The location of cabinet
papers and private telephone transcripts delivered to the estate in
1973 - and kept there for an unknown period of time - by the then
Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

The
Stone Barns Center for Food &
Agriculture - Outside the Park, this was opened by David
Rockefeller and Peggy Dulany in 2004 and was established in memory
of Rockefeller's wife, Peggy. It is a not-for-profit
agricultural and educational center on of farmland, in the heart of
the family-donated Rockefeller State Park Preserve, allied
to the family-funded Pocantico Central School. It sells
organic local produce, meat and eggs to the nearby public
for-profit restaurant, Blue Hill, as well as to local
businesses in the Pocantico Hills area.

The Rockefeller Archive Center - A voluminous
three-story underground bunker built below the foundations of the
Hillcrest mansion of Martha Baird Rockefeller, situated
just outside the Park area. This is an impressively equipped
repository of 150-plus years of Rockefeller papers, memorabilia and
other outside organizations' collections. It is staffed by ten
full-time archivists who patrol forty-foot-long shelves on rails,
and it contains, for researchers, the publicly restricted and
expurgated family history.

In addition, family members over the generations have had a
profound impact on the township of Pocantico Hills which
is situated in the open space of the estate and is
completely surrounded by family-owned land. The Union Church
of Pocantico Hills, now owned by Historic Hudson Valley, was built by
the family, who commissioned the famous stained-glass windows by
Matisse (an abstract rose window,
memorializing Abby Aldrich), and Chagall
(the remainder of the windows, focusing on Biblical prophets and
some New Testament themes, and memorializing various member of the
family and others); they also helped finance the construction of
the local Pocantico Hills School.

Residences of other family members on the estate

"Hudson Pines" - The residence and farm of the
family's current patriarch, David
Rockefeller, located just north of the Park ( ), originally
built for, and occupied by his only sister, Abby.

"Abeyton Lodge" - The residence of Junior, outside the
Park, demolished when he took up residence in Kykuit after his
father's death.

"Hillcrest" - A Rockefeller
University property, outside the Park, formerly the mansion
built for Martha Baird Rockefeller, the second wife of Junior, and
the current location of the massive 3-story underground bunker
housing the Rockefeller Archive Center, built deep beneath
the home's foundations.

"Rockwood Hall" - The one time residence of Laurance Rockefeller, outside the Park,
this was the original property of Senior's brother William Rockefeller, which was sold to
Junior in 1937. He had no real use for the property, however, and
so had the mansion and its outbuildings razed. Later he deeded the
property to Laurance who, in 1970, sold to IBM
for its Americas/Far East headquarters; this is now owned and
occupied by New York Life
Insurance. Subsequently, Laurance leased the rest of the
property to the State of New York as a public park for one dollar a
year, underwriting the maintenance costs. He donated this property
outright to New York State in 1999, as part of the Rockefeller
State Preserve.

Further reading

The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste,
and Power in the Twentieth-Century America, Robert F. Dalzell
and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007.

Notes

Estate offered as site for the UN headquarters -- see John
Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century: Three
Generations of America's Greatest Family, New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1988. (pp.432-33)

Prominent visitors to the estate, including Chagall and Warhol
-- Roberts, op.cit. (p.34).

http://www.hudsonvalley.org/about/index.htm

Coach Barn and vehicles illustrating auto design - Ibid.,
(p.98)

Pocantico Conferences and the Coach Barn - Ibid., (pp.13-14,
47-48); See also the Rockefeller Brothers Fund official website
list of Conferences in External Links.

The vetted and expurgated family archives available to
researchers in the underground bunker - see Cary Reich, The
Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958,
New York: Doubleday, 1996. (pp.774-75)